Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic PeriodUniversity of Pennsylvania Press, 2013 M04 23 - 256 pages In a series of articles published in Tait's Magazine in 1834, Thomas DeQuincey catalogued four potential instances of plagiarism in the work of his friend and literary competitor Samuel Taylor Coleridge. DeQuincey's charges and the controversy they ignited have shaped readers' responses to the work of such writers as Coleridge, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, and John Clare ever since. But what did plagiarism mean some two hundred years ago in Britain? What was at stake when early nineteenth-century authors levied such charges against each other? How would matters change if we were to evaluate these writers by the standards of their own national moment? And what does our moral investment in plagiarism tell us about ourselves and about our relationship to the Romantic myth of authorship? |
From inside the book
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... genius, originality, and invention to the exclusion collaboration, assimilation, and narrative dominance, this project is an extension of McGann's thesis. However, there are ways in which it represents a revision: one of the central ...
... genius does not square with how early nineteenth-century British writers described or enacted their relationship to appropriation, borrowing, or plagiarism. However, while this book is primarily about Romantic-period literature and its ...
... genius by obscuring the extent to which all writing is necessarily collab— orative and intertextual.7 The traditionalists respond by arguing that this is a transparent effort to excuse plagiarism and the literary theft that it ...
... genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe” and that “every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed."15 Coleridge ...
... genius [that Virgil] affected the fame of an imitator, even whilst he created anew all that he copied; and none among the flock of mock-birds . . . have sought even to fulfil a single condition of epic truth.”19 Shelley's argument was ...
Contents
1 | |
17 | |
3 Property and the Margins of Literary Print Culture | 49 |
Byron Originality and Aesthetic Plagiarism | 86 |
Travel Writing and the Defense of Modern Poetry | 122 |
Class Improvement and Enclosure | 144 |
Afterword | 182 |
Notes | 189 |
Bibliography | 211 |
Index | 227 |
Acknowledgments | 235 |